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One sign of having good self-esteem is your confidence in your choices and decisions. You trust your judgment and act accordingly.
Instead of looking outwardly for validation and guidance, you look within and trust you Inner Wisdom or Higher Self.
You respect yourself and acknowledge that your life and experiences have provided you with the tools and knowledge to help yourself.
When you let others take decisions for you without your active participation, you are setting yourself up for failure because it is not your decision, not based on your experience and out of touch with Source, your Inner Guide.
So, look inward instead of outward to other people for guidance unless it is something where you really need a more experienced person to guide you on your journey. Even then, trust your intuition and your own counsel to decide what is best for you.
This may be hard at first, given our conditioning to make decisions based on the outside world, by putting the world first and then yourself. Making a shift and change of mindset takes time and motivation to stay on track.
If you fall down in your endeavors, don’t give up. Just accept that you slipped and decide that you will continue towards your goal with more resolve.
In the course of life, you will face many situations where you need to take decisions and make choices. If you worry that you may make the wrong choices or decisions, you will never be able to move forward.
There are no guarantees, you simply have to trust yourself, have faith that you know more than you give yourself credit for.
Spend a little time each day connecting with Your Higher Self and intuition.
This can be first thing in the morning or even the last thing at night. Give it the right information and you will receive the right guidance.
For this you need to have self-confidence that you will consider the right information. While gathering your information, do not be afraid to ask questions. Explore all options.
Sometimes there will be clear cut either/or options and sometimes more than two options.
In such a case, consider the pros and cons of each option and the outcome that you envisage based on the same. Delve into your memory for similar or somewhat similar situations and how you had taken care of them. What went wrong? What went right? What could have been improved?
Having done your homework and taken into account your prior knowledge and experience, you just have to trust yourself and make a choice.
Having made a choice and taken a decision accept responsibility for your decision and make it work to the best of your abilities.
You may need support, you may need further guidance. It is at this point that you can reach out to others who have walked the path before you for insights. Share this information with your Intuition and let your Higher Self partner with you for success.
Know that we can all improve. The road to self-improvement begins with self-belief and self-trust. It means having confidence in your capabilities and not caring about the world at large.
If you are about to make a mistake, your true friends and well-wishers will let you know. You will also meet a lot of negative thinkers who will say everything to create doubts in your mind. Ignore them, they don’t matter. You do.
Just embrace the truth, you can trust yourself!
Additional Resource
Need more help? Check out my Self-help and Self-study program Self Confidence in 8 Steps on Kindle. If you are a Do It Yourself buff who wants the guidance but loves to fly solo, then this book is a must check out. Just click on the image to check out the preview.
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Great post and great reminder for me! I 100% agree with what you said in this blog post. We need to trust ourselves. Thank you for sharing the great post Vatsala 🙂
Thanks Kaz. May all your days be happy and may World Peace be established in our time.
Power post Vatsala! We always need to trust ourselves, because in the end we are what is important not what others think 🙂 Thanks for the great share!
I’m glad you liked the post, Joan. How many times our parents and mentors will tell us to have faith in ourselves? Umpteen times because they know that deep down inside, our Higher Self has our best interest at heart and all we need to do is listen to our Inner Voice.
Like your Dr Seuss quote. There are sometimes when the decision I make has the positive outcome I was going for, but I always wonder what if… would a different decision have had a better conclusion. Enjoyed the post.
One never knows until one tries, does one, Joe? We can often wonder about different outcomes for different decisions although I like to believe that we take the right decisions for the moment. Hindsight is 20:20 vision which the present moment doesn’t provide. Glad you liked the Dr. Seuss quote.
Love the Dr. Seuss quote (I’m such a fan), and I love how you keep reiterating we need to trust ourselves. It is so easy to give our power to others, and that only confuses us in the end. Very powerful advice, Vatsala. 🙂
Thanks Liz. Someday I should do an exclusive Dr Seuss post for all of us fans of the Great Cat in the Hat. 🙂
Vatsala, Very few people really learn how to not be attached to opinions, judgements, outcomes. Fabulous skill & if you haven’t written a blog about it, could be a great one. People think not being attached is not caring. A complicated concept.
That is so true, Roslyn. Just this morning I got a question on Quora from a young man asking me how to deal with people who ignore him because he is not thick-skinned and is not able to reciprocate ignoring. The answer will be complicated too because there is an issue of self-confidence involved here. I have written many posts on the topic over the years and perhaps it is time to do a round up. Thanks for the suggestion.
I love the gentleness that is so apparent in your posts Vatsala. I find it comforting because as you encourage self-growth you are also encouraging self-forgiveness when we stumble. Self-confidence has always been an issue with me and I’m often second guessing my decisions. I have found age has given me the gift of relying on other’s opinion less but I still need to take a big breath and a leap of faith to trust in myself more.
Thank you for the compliment, Tamuria. I appreciate you! Even the most self-confident person can find themselves in a situation where confidence and self-assurance needs a booster in the form of support from others. Take that leap of Faith and believe in yourself. Incidentally, I’ve written a Kindle self-help course on the topic too called Self-Confidence in 8 Steps.
Seems I’ve learned this lesson of self-trust as I’ve moved through life, especially relating to my health and wellness. When I was younger I trusted my parents and my doctors and yet, through those experiences, I learned to ask lots of questions and to ultimately trust myself first. My intuition is very strong and often times I still doubt it and ask others their opinion. Regardless of how many people say go “left”, if I am leaning towards going “right”, I ultimately choose myself and go right. I act out of this a lot too. Instead of lots of “to do” lists, I work very much from intuition and sometimes in the middle of doing something completely unrelated, I have a strong calling to “do this now” and generally my timing is right on. Thanks for the encouragement for us all to trust ourselves more and the outside world less, Vatsala. As the world continues to get noisier and noisier, the best place to begin..is within.
Absolutely, Beverley. There is a beautiful card in the Osho Zen Deck called Source which, indicates that whenever we feel the noise outside of us, we need to go to the Source to energize and find ourselves.
I am a firm believer in ongoing self-growth. Sometimes while on the path, we look for validation from others. I think it’s ok if you trust them. But, I’ve often learned if you let others judgement of you be your guide, you are in big trouble. The nice thing about a good coach is they hold you to be your best.
I agree with you that we often end up seeking validation from others and then if it is contrary to what we believe, we start having second thoughts Roslyn. My parents taught me 2 rules when taking the opinions of others.
1. Trust but verify and
2. Listen to everyone from a place of detachment but do what you feel is correct.
Sound advice. 🙂
Love the Dr. Seuss quote, Vatsala, and love the way you wove that into our every day activities. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m paying attention to my intuition and am finding that it suits me well to do so. A misstep here, a correction there. The learning continues.
I’m delighted you loved the Dr Seuss quote, Deb. That Cat in the Hat really rocks! Trusting one’s intuition is always a good idea because we usually know within ourselves what is best for us. To continued learning!
Love that you started with a Dr Seuss quote. Trust yourself isn’t alway easy but it is important. Learning to make decisions that are true to yourself. Yes, they maybe wrong but you can make adjustments.
Hello there Fellow Dr Seuss Fan! I agree with you Heather, that trusting oneself is not always easy although important. The best part is as you pointed out that even when we get it wrong, we can make adjustments.